AT&T reorg favors market-target structure

AT&T is reorganizing to eliminate its original service-based management structure in favor of market-target structuring. The move will put the former wireless head, de la Vega, as head of consumer services, and could thus also be interpreted as a shift toward a wireless-centric policy.

We think that a market-based organization is smart given the fact that symbiosis among services seems key to leveraging opportunity and creating new applications and services using componentized service-layer infrastructure, all goals of operators worldwide. It also comes at a time when AT&T and other operators are puzzling out their capex plans for 2009, which will depend on some notion of how to monetize network investment.